Weekend Box Office: ‘Solo’ Sputters on Memorial Day

As expected, Solo: A Star Wars Storywas the number one movie of the holiday weekend. But the film fell well below expectations in terms of box office. According to Box Office Mojo, early projections had the spinoff earning “anywhere from $130-150 million for the four-day weekend.” After it made just $83.3 million through Sunday, it will be lucky to clear $100 million for the holiday. This is the opposite of making the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.

Here’s the full box office chart:

Film

Weekend

Per Screen

Total

1

Solo: A Star Wars Story

$83,325,000

$19,020

$83,325,000

2

Deadpool 2

$42,700,000 (-66%)

$9,818

$207,407,352

3

Avengers: Infinity War

$16,494,000 (-44%)

$4,377

$621,688,638

4

Book Club

$9,450,000 (-30%)

$3,363

$31,834,516

5

Life of the Party

$5,115,000 (-32%)

$1,742

$39,102,348

6

Breaking In

$4,055,000 (-40%)

$2,043

$35,643,385

7

Show Dogs

$3,078,000 (-48%)

$958

$10,672,960

8

Overboard

$3,000,000 (-35%)

$2,508

$41,494,413

9

A Quiet Place

$2,230,000 (-43%)

$1,463

$179,993,607

10

RBG

$1,120,000 (-10%)

$2,699

$5,636,638

Solo’s $83.3 total makes it the smallest Star Wars opening weekend since Attack of the Clones in 2002. (Adjusted for inflation, where Phantom Menace’s $64.8 million opening in 1999 dollars becomes $97.6 million, it’s a weaker opening than all of the prequels.) It’s hard to describe any movie that makes $80 million (and $148.3 million worldwide) in three days as a disaster, but given that the film cost a reported $300 million, and given that Star Wars have never really disappointed at the box office in any way before, Solo is in trouble. Disney will need to reassess this situation before committing to any future spinoffs in the future. (And if you wanted the Solo sequel the film teases, I wouldn’t hold my breath.)

The second biggest film of the weekend was Deadpool 2, which had some unwelcome news of its own. It still grossed $42.7 million, but amidst competition from Star Wars, it dropped almost 67 percent from its debut. That means it won’t come close to matching the totals generated by the first Deadpool ($363 million in the U.S. and $783 million worldwide.) $207.4 million domestic to date is nothing to sneeze at (and it’s doing better than Solo) but the novelty of a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed superhero may have be wearing off.

At least one summer blockbuster so far is performing up to expectations: Avengers: Infinity War has already grossed $621.8 million in the United States. That means that by next week it will have made more than any Marvel movie in the U.S. except for Black Panther (which also means that Marvel has already had its biggest year ever by far already - and they still have a third film, Ant-Man and the Wasp, they’re releasing in the summer). In fourth place was Book Club, which dropped just 30 percent from last weekend, a sign that word-of-mouth on the boozy adult comedy is doing well. Fifth place belonged to Life of the Party, the Melissa McCarthy vehicle about a woman who is [checks notes] the life of the party. The film’s totals look like they will be the smallest of the three films McCarthy has made with her husband, Ben Falcone.

Even with its tepid box-office numbers, Solo still had the best per-screen average of the weekend, with $19,020 at each of its 4300 locations around the country. In second place for PSA was the new “unrestored” 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey touring theaters this summer. On four screens the film made $66,000, for an average of $16,500.